We Had a Very Good Shepherd

From George Weigel’s Foreword to LIGHT OF THE WORLD by Pope Benedict XVI:

“Popes, if they have the wit and the stomach for it, see the whole picture-the entirety of the human drama, in both its nobility and its wickedness. And they see it through the prism of humanity’s origins and humanity’s ultimate destiny.”

He quotes Morris West (SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN) who said “The man who wore the Fisherman’s ring and the triple tiara carried also the sins of the world like a leaden cope on his shoulders….Only a fool would envy him the power and the glory and the terror of such a principality.”

Of Benedict, Weigel says that he “brought to the papacy more than a half-century of reflection on the truths of biblical faith and a master teacher’s capacity to explicate those truths and bring them to bear on contemporary situations in a luminously clear way…..whose command of the Bible, the Fathers, and the theological traditions of the Christian West and the Christian East is simply unparalleled….a thoroughgoing Christian disciple who believes that friendship with Jesus is the key to human happiness…” He calls him “a man of exquisite manners and a pastor’s kind heart ” and credits him with now “reforming the papacy by returning it to its evangelical roots as an office of witness to the truth of God in Christ…from the unique vantage point of the papacy, seeing a world yearning for love but attaching itself to false loves.”